Professional Windows® Phone 7 Game Development: Creating Games using XNA Game Studio 4

PREFACE

This is my second opportunity to get my XNA-related words published in real-life book form. The first time I did this, I was writing a book about how to make a game more or less exactly like the one I put on Xbox Live Arcade. It ended up being full of very long code snippets and phrases that read something like, "This next part is really cool, but before that we have to do something very boring."

I think my takeaway lesson from writing that book was that my tone is, in general, way too apologetic. Maybe I just assumed no one would have as much fun writing an animation editor as I did. Or maybe one too many times I'd watched the eyes of someone outside of the nerd-rock-star elite glaze over as I gushed electrically about how cool it is to get parallax scrolling working the first time. But I think I got distracted from a critical truth: Making games is awesome.

I used to be a bit spoiled. While going to school at SUNY Institute of Technology, I got by doing the bare minimum of studying to afford as much game-making time as possible. Then, when that end-of-semester time of reckoning approached, I'd redeem myself with a term project somehow powered by DirectX even though the course never called for it. "Exploding spacecraft, gushing blood, and not a PowerPoint slide in sight!? My only regret is there is no grade higher than A!" is what I liked to imagine my professors saying. But those were the risks I took to do my Favorite Thing on Earth.

Now I'm immensely spoiled. I get to stay ...